Sets Database and Tabs

I'm writing this post for a request. I use Brickset as a reference site for my sets (I think it is the faster, well updated and user friendly site for this), so I have a long list of Bricksets's pages in my bookmarks. For each set, there is a page with various tabs: Main image, Minifigs, ... BrickLists, Links. Every tab ha an address, such as "http://www.brickset.com/detail/?set=6073-1#ui-tabs-1", with a number that identifies the tab. I use to link sets using internal anchors, so that I immediately have the page I need.

The "problem" is that the number associated to a tab is not fixed, but may vary (and often do that!).

My request is: is it possible to associate every tab to a specific anchor number? #ui-tabs-1 for the main page, #ui-tabs-2 for minifigs, .... #ui-tabs-10 for Links.

If modify the plugin to associate numbers to types results to be too difficult or too complex, perhaps a simple solution could be to add a second anchor with the name of the tab, independent from the number. So, for example, the 6th tab representing links could have two anchors, the first is "#ui-tabs-6", the second "#links".

Interesting. Not sure why it is a problem that the link is called "ui-tabs-2" instead of "alternate pictures" or whatever. That said, the jQuery UI Tabs is not the best for bookmarking specific tabs. There is, however, a workaround to this problem explained here:http://weblog.muledesign.com/2009/05/bookmarkable_tabs_with_jquery_ui.phpIt uses the jQuery scrollTo plugin and its related localScroll plugin to make things work better.

The reason the anchors, which is what you're bookmarking, change is because they are dynamically generated by the plugin, as mentioned before. There is a special section in the code that the plugin looks at and will use to create the tabs. This section has a list of places that have data that will become the individual tabs. The plugin interprets this list and generates all of the code that results in what you see on your screen. When it does this, the plugin simply assigns the tabs anchors with numbers as it creates tabs, incrementing them sequentially. Since different pages have a different number of tabs, the number assigned each tab is not consistent across all pages.

I'm pretty sure you can't just add an anchor into the special section that becomes the tabs because it will interfere with the creation of tabs. Modifying the plugin would be complicated. I don't see an easy solution to your problem.

The workaround I mentioned above deals with a different problem: it isn't straightforward to bookmark individual tabs. What the workaround does is make the url in the address bar change when you go to different tabs. That way, you can just click on the bookmark button and don't have to right click anything. It also makes sure that when you visit a specific tab, you'll see the tab bar. You'll notice now that when you visit your bookmarks the tab bar is above the visible portion of the page.

Also note, the demo in the workaround does not use the dynamic method of creating tabs and pulling content from a database. The tabs are static and the content is in the page.

The problem is that I've bookmarked hundreds of sets, and every time I access one of them I have to clik on the tab to obtain the data I want. So I thought to directly bookmark the tab I need. Get the link using rightclick is not a great problem, the great problem is to keep hundreds of links updated. It is an enormous waste of time, so simply I don't do that.

I made a long work to bookmark all my bookmarked set, and later I noticed that a great number of bookmarks don't lead me to the desired tab (stupid me that I don't checked before...). So I asked here if there is a solution to my problem, but it seems there are more difficulties than I thought... (it seems to me so easy to modify the plugin...)